How to choose a video conferencing app for your team

How to hold video meetings, step by step

1. List your meeting types: internal calls, client calls, and webinars or larger events.
2. Note your longest meeting, your largest group and whether you must record.
3. Pick an app your guests can join easily, ideally from a browser link.
4. Connect it to your calendar so every invite carries a join link.
5. Decide where recordings are stored and who can see them.
6. Run a test call with screen sharing and recording before your first client meeting.

What to look for

Editorial assessment

• Meeting length on the plan Free plans may end group meetings at a time limit. Check the limit for group calls, not just one-to-one calls.
• Recording and storage Check whether recording is included, whether it saves to the computer or the cloud, and how long cloud recordings are kept.
• Participant cap Check the maximum attendees per meeting on the plan you would buy, especially for all-hands meetings or client workshops.
• Webinar features Registration, attendee-only views and moderated questions can be a separate product or add-on. Price that separately if you run events.
• Joining as a guest Clients should be able to join from a browser without creating an account. Test from a device outside your company.
• Calendar fit Check that join links are added automatically in the calendar your team uses.

What to settle before you buy

• Who hosts meetings, and who only ever joins?
• How large is your biggest regular meeting, and how long does it run?
• Do you need to record, and who may watch the recordings?
• Do you run webinars or public events, or only internal and client calls?
• Which calendar and office suite must it work with?

How we built this page

We start from the job, not the product. The phrasings people search for this job (for example “free video conferencing no time limit”) come from our research into how small and mid-size teams describe it. Which software categories the job takes is our editorial judgment. Every tool, entry price, billing unit and date comes from HelpCompare’s open dataset, recorded from each vendor’s own pricing page; nothing is estimated, and where a vendor publishes no price we say so. We take no affiliate commissions and publish no scores of our own. See our methodology or download the data from Open Data.

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